It was nighttime still, albeit nearing dawn. I should wait until the sun rose and the vampires had mostly gone to their respective rooms. Then I winced—thinking of the room right next to mine, and the man within who’d be back any minute. Vampire hearing was impeccable. If I tried to get out while he was there, he’d know it.
But… I’d paid attention to Raihn’s movements, too. He spent very little time in his room. Oftentimes, he didn’t return until well after sunrise.
So, I’d have to gamble. Wait until tomorrow—wait long enough that most vampires had gone to sleep, but not long enough that Raihn had.
And then what?
You know this castle better than anyone here, little serpent, Vincent whispered to me, and I flinched, as I always did when I heard his voice.
He was right, though. Not only had I lived in this castle my entire life, I’d learned how to sneak around it with no one noticing—not even the last King of the Nightborn.
I just needed to bide my time.
4
RAIHN
“That,” Cairis muttered, “was a shit show.”
“I don’t think it went that badly.”
Ketura closed the door behind us. The room was simultaneously too empty and so messy you couldn’t think in it. It had been a library before—a room devoted to displaying items that were very beautiful, very old, or very expensive, and usually all three. Ketura had commanded most of the castle be stripped—for information, for traps—and some poor servant had gotten halfway through pulling the books off the shelves before she decided that this particular room was the only acceptable base of operations.
Now, it was a haphazard disaster—the shelves on one side bare, piles of books shoved into a corner. The long table at the center of the room was covered with notes and maps and books and a few discarded glass goblets from the night before, congealing red crusted at their bottoms.
Vincent had been in power for two-hundred years. There was a lot of clutter to strip away.
I was secretly grateful for it.
The night the Kejari ended, I had flown here with a pit of dread in my stomach. I’d had more than enough distractions—Oraya’s unconscious body in my arms, Vincent’s blood all over my hands, an Heir Mark burning on my back, and an entire fucking kingdom on my shoulders. And yet, I’d still paused at the doors of this castle, the memory of the past chasing me.
Maybe that made me a coward.
But two hundred years was a long time. The place looked very different under Vincent’s rule. It was enough to disguise the worst of the memories, night-to-night. Still, I couldn’t bring myself to visit some wings at all.
I dragged a seat out and sat down heavily, propping my heels up on the corner of the table. The chair groaned slightly under my weight. I let my head fall back and stared at the ceiling—silver tiles, etched with Hiaj wings. Ugh.
“What were you going to do if Vale didn’t show up when he did?” Cairis asked. “Slaughter them all?”
“Doesn’t sound like a bad idea,” I said. “It’s what the great Neculai Vasarus would have done.”
“You aren’t him.”
Something about his tone made my head snap up.
He said that like it was a bad thing.
That thought sickened me. For some reason, my mind drifted back to the night of the wedding, and the promise I had made Oraya when I’d practically begged her to work with me.
We’ll rip apart the worlds that subjugated both of us, and from the ashes we’ll build something new.
I’d meant every word of it.
But Oraya had just looked at me with hatred and disgust, and hell if I could blame her for that. And now here I was picking blood out from under my fingernails, deciding how to best make myself just like the man who had destroyed me.
She could always see right through the bullshit.
A knock rang out, thankfully interrupting that line of conversation. Ketura opened the door, and Vale stepped in. He paused and bowed his head to me as he closed the door behind him.
“Highness.”
Sometimes, it’s the little things that make the reality of a situation hit you.
Vale’s over-the-top declaration of fealty hadn’t done it. But this, this casual little half bow, the exact same one he used to give Neculai—it made me feel as if I was two centuries in the past, my former master standing right behind me.
Ketura had wanted Vale as my Head of War. She was good at execution, but we needed someone strategic. And Cairis had insisted that it be someone with noble blood—someone respected by all the people who wouldn’t respect me. “To legitimize you,” he’d said.